The Graveyard Shift

"Somewhere over there, is my grandmother's." I looked in the direction Elton's finger pointed to. More Crosses there. It all looked the same. It was eerie. What else did I expect in a graveyard? The caretaker had told me, "I can't tell you whether there are ghosts. You'll have to go in there to know." I flinched at the thought. Elton continued walking, calm as usual.

This was my idea. Most people in Mumbai would have found a better way and a better place on a Sunday afternoon. Certainly not cemetery tours. I was on a journalistic assignment - to find out whether there were enough places for the dead to rest in peace in the space-starved city. My colleagues had chickened out when I had suggested we tour together. "You're on your own on this one," they had told me. I was scared to do this alone. The fear of the living preyed more on my mind than the fear of the dead. Mumbai's graveyards were encroached upon by drug-peddlers and petty criminals, so I had heard. I would certainly have to take someone along. That's when I thought of Elton. Not that my mild, lanky six-two-footer of a friend would be a deterrent to criminals, but still company was company and Elton's was desired.

I had known Elton since college. From being just a patronising senior who would draw my biology diagrams, he had become my friend, philosopher and guide. There were friends and then there was Elton - the one who would take the plunge when others were still testing the water. Why he'd even volunteered to step into a coffin to give me a sense of its size earlier that day. (The undertaker had asked him to reconsider saying, "You aren't dead yet.")

I surveyed the graves - there were thousands of them, all with white marble Crosses that had turned grey. The symmetry was strangely unnerving. I looked at Elton. His face was calm. He could have been strolling down the beach lost in thoughts. Only Elton could walk through a dreadful place like this, I thought. We read the inscriptions on the tombstones - some elaborate marble-granite ones dating back to the 1800s, others that cost lakhs of rupees and belonged to rich businessmen of the 1930s. Elton stopped, suddenly. "This one is Granny's," he whispered. It didn't look very different from those around. There was a small picture of her and some flowers. Elton was silent, as if he was praying secretly. We paused for a few minutes and then moved on.

Elton talked about how the spirits of the dead would enter the crows (there were just too many around). I asked, "So once I die, I'll become a crow?" "You can choose to be something else if you want to. You know more birds than most people do," Elton said, referring to my knowledge of ornithology. Only he could find humour in a place like this. I managed a smile. This was supposed to be a difficult assignment, even scary. And here, I'd spent over an hour at the cemetery. And I had liked it too - so much that I did not want this to end. As we walked between the graves back towards the exit, my humour was back. I said, "We're walking down the aisle and even the dead can't keep us apart!" Elton chuckled.

To read the article that was published in Downtown Plus, (now called The Times of South Mumbai) click here